Recent Reads

My ward book club picked The Choice by Nicholas Sparks for our February gathering. I'm just gonna say it straight: I didn't like this book. I admit that I walked into it with a bad attitude. As soon as I realized it was still in hard back, I started to wonder what sort of book this was and once I found out what other books Nicholas Sparks has written, I decided he was nothing more than a male Danielle Steele. In fact the only reason I'm bothering to mention it here is because I didn't get to gripe about it enough at book club. It's basically Sparks's response to the Terry Schiavo incident. Aside from the fact that some of the writing is so sappy it's unintentionally hilarious and that the ending is ridiculous, it's also quite chauvinistic. The female lead, Gabby, is supposed to be an independent, intelligent woman and yet her love interest, Travis, is the one making all the decisions. He's the one who recognizes long before Gabby does, that they are meant for each other. And ultimately he's the one who makes the life changing decision that disregards Gabby's living will. Is this really what American women want these days--to read about women who still have men making all their decisions for them?

While I was reading The Choice, I was also listening to My Sister's Keeper byJodi Picoult, which was an interesting contrast since it also dealt with the issue of personal control of one's body for medical reasons. The plot focuses on Anna's decision to seek medical emancipation at age 13 so that she will no longer have to donate bone marrow, blood, or a kidney to her older sister who has leukemia. When Anna's older sister Kate was diagnosed with leukemia, her parents decided to have another child, a child that would be a perfect donor for Kate. Like The Choice, the ending to this book might also have been too perfect, but I didn't mind it as much. And rather than insinuate what my response should be to Anna's medical situation, Picoult did a nice job presenting the different view points of everyone in Anna's family. I did feel like Anna's mother was too distant at times, but maybe I would be the same way if I had spent the last fourteen years of my life trying to save my daughter's life. And I thought that Picoult at times was appropriately ambiguous about each family member's motivations, especially since I think most of us don't always know our own motivations.